for my project at uni i have to write a mini-paper, and i am writing it on "Alife - current progress and future uses". for this i am going to introduce alife, then examine the uses of nueral networks and genetic algorithms, then go on to look into future uses. does anyone have any ideas of what else i could write, or any pointers to what other areas of alife i should look at? also, i have loads of .ps files, i presume they are postscript files, but cant open them in windows. anyone know what program i can open them in? thanks __BLAKEY__

MS PowerPoint, you could also look at pathfinding algos
like A Star or tracking algorithms.
check www.ai-depot.com

At my uni., the AI group of profs are working a system that would filter out email based on the way you treat current email. Think of it as a smart spam catcher.

Don''t know if thats what you wanted.

I can certainly suggest the work of Adrian Thompson. He used field programmable gate arrays (FPGA''s) to do the world''s first hardware evolution. You can find his homepage at Sussex uni at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html.

He reduced the size of a chip that could understand the words "start" and "stop" to 10% the size of the best human designed chip.

He''s currently working on evolving nanotech and he gave me 90% for my simulation of adaptive behaviour essay, so he can''t go wrong in my book ;-)

Also, check out the other faculty at Sussex at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/csai/. People like Inman Harvey, Ezequiel Di Paolo and the like are doing stunning stuff on ALife.

Mike

A google search using the term ''Alife'' turned up 50,000 results. I am certain that among the first 100 you would find everything you needed for your paper.

Cheers,

Timkin